Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England by Robert G. Ingram (review)

This compelling revisionist account of English intellectual, religious, and political history in the first half of the eighteenth century deserves a wide and lasting readership. It offers a pioneering description of the overwhelmingly Christian intellectual culture of the period that even scholars who have little interest in eighteenth-century Christianity cannot afford to ignore, and it also manages to provide a valuable introduction to the theological and religious politics of the era for the relatively uninitiated. This is to say nothing of the scores of useful insights and points of information it provides for specialists. There is no better single text for scholars and students interested in understanding the elite religio-political context of other topics in the history of the period, and there is no better text for students seeking an initial, but nevertheless sophisticated and original, understanding of the crucial theological and ecclesiological controversies of the era and the dominant concerns of the early eighteenth-century English elite. Reformation Without End should inspire a flurry of related scholarship and remain a standard work of reference and introduction in the decades to come. It compares favorably to superficially similar revisionist accounts of the period, including that of J.C.D. Clark.

The basic claim of the work is that the first three quarters of the eighteenth century constitute the last phase of England’s “Long Reformation.” In other words, this was anything but a moment in which England’s public life became overwhelmingly Enlightened or secularized in any traditional sense. English print culture was dominated by polemical divinity and other religious material. Those who engaged in that culture in defense of and in resistance to orthodoxy saw themselves as engaged in polemics—that is, in a polemos, a “warfare on earth”—in the interest of saving truths. English Protestants living in the wake of the Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution, Ingram argues, set out unsuccessfully to resolve what were basically the same theological questions that had plagued Protestants since the Reformation, using Renaissance tools that had for some time been common currency in these internal conflicts. More specifically, they continued to grapple with the religious questions that had caused, but not been resolved by, the seventeenth-century revolutions (which were themselves Reformation conflicts) by employing the histories of both antiquity and England’s recent past against their adversaries.

This book is a learned study of four important but understudied polemical divines: perhaps the central figure of early eighteenth-century English orthodox theology, Daniel Waterland; the Christian skeptic Conyers Middleton; the orthodox historian Zachary Grey; and an idiosyncratic and widely-read defender of Anglican Enlightenment, William Warburton. On this level alone the book challenges readers to reconsider the pantheon of eighteenth-century English intellectual life. Each of Ingram’s case studies has been chosen to bring out different aspects of English polemical divinity in a revealing thematic progression that has just the right balance of novelty and repetition as it unfolds. In each section, Ingram reconstructs the particular contexts of these figures’ polemical engagements in wonderful detail. He draws on an impressive body of deep and wide research in print and manuscript sources, from correspondence and sermon notes to marginalia and local church records. The contexts he reconstructs are multi-layered, incorporating everything from the patronage, political, and publishing dimensions of ecclesiastical and literary careers to the histories of education and scholarship. But the four case studies are only the starting point for appreciating the richness and value of the work. Within them, Ingram offers concise examinations of the diverse set of contemporaries and recent predecessors with whom these four men were polemically engaged and intellectually connected. Taken together, these parts serve as an excellent guide to the theological and ecclesiological spectrum of the period, from deism to sacerdotalism.

Ingram deals primarily with the first half of the eighteenth century and treats it synchronically, in keeping with the book’s...